User blog:Sings-With-Spirits/The Real-World history of Renegade Legion and how this colored its development.
As most Renegade Legion enthusiasts know, the game was originally developed by FASA as a Star Wars RPG. When West End Games got the license, FASA decided to rework the fluff and release it as its own setting: Renegade Legion. You can still see the (pre-prequel) SW influence in RL: a galaxy-spanning evil empire (formerly a democratic republic) ruled by humans is fighting a rebellion in the far end of the galaxy; a rebellion that is like a cancer spreading anti-imperial sentiments throughout the empire. Fighter combat is king. Capital ships are generally wedge-shaped kilometer-long gray behemoths bristling with laser weapons. Speeders, lasers, imperial senators, rebels, even stormtroopers (Just *look* at the art, people!). Of course, with the rework, a lot was changed; the general impression is that someone lay a solid foundation for the “rome-in-space” and it was followed through by various other individuals with varying degrees of success. The first real issue comes from the people actually writing the stuff: most of them were FASA staff used to writing for the Battletech setting, which is a tremendously rich and deep setting, but is, at its heart, a small-unit tactical game, where 4-unit “lances” and 12-unit “companies” are the primary focus of the game; regiments are made up of 108 ‘mechs and were considered “large” formations (this in the pre-RCT days). Given this background and the canon statement that “the Legion is the basic foundadion of military units” it’s easy to see how these writers would believe that a 600-grav tank, 2,000-line infantry 50,000 trooper legion, with integral 360-fighter air wing would be sufficient to hold one world. But as I said before; the numbers don’t wash. In time, FASA dropped the RL line; the reasons were never given, though many speculate that FASA was, in effect, competing against itself with a superior combat system and what they perceived as a “black & white”,”good vs evil” setting without the moral ambivalence of the Inner Sphere nations and the clans. After the “death” of RL, the SW universe definitely got richer; we can see the potential inherent in RL’s setting without resorting to the fantasy elements in SW (which I do love, don’t get me wrong; I just like to have some more serious sci-fi every so often), especially after the prequels and the clone wars: we have good and honest people on both sides, ruthless corruption on both sides, other empires waiting in the wings to jump on the weakened empire and multiple factions all trying to get by. Seeing these elements in SW makes it easy to visualize their use in a RL setting with more adult themes and less “dumbification” for kids (jar-jar, ‘nuff said); we can discuss religion, racial issues, women’s issues, birth rights, national rights, politics, corruption… the RL setting lends itself to this sort of controversial subject matter; in adult discussion, being on either side of any of these issues does not automatically make a person “good” or “evil”, despite the opinion of their counterpart. But I digress. In time, FASA went on to develop Battletech into the rich setting it is today (under Catalyst Labs, as I write this) with minimal “retcon” of established canon. This has engendered a mentality in BT players that “retcons are bad”. While partially true (nobody wants to invalidate hundreds of books through retcon), they still want to apply it to other settings, like RL. The situation is not the same: BT has undergone many editions while remaining virtually the same (I’ll add that the “no retcons” policy was NEVER applied to the aerospace side of BT; AT1, 2, 2R and TW/TO are all essentially different games with fluff that often simply does not carry from one edition to the next), while RL never really got the chance to develop a second edition. RL simply has too many internal inconsistencies to hold up outside of the wargame battlefields. It never got a serious, comprehensive look at its in-game reality and got saddled with a small-scale BT mentality. In time another company (Nightshift Games) got the rights to RL and tried to do something about it, but little was done before they lost the license and are now but a footnote in the history of the setting. It is my sincere hope that you read this and give “The Annotated RL” I present here the chance it deserves as one of the richest, best sci-fi settings available. --Sings-With-Spirits (talk) 00:32, October 18, 2013 (UTC) Category:Blog posts Category:Fireangel Articles Category:Original Articles